While I understand the frustration, I’d rather have more hobby horse riders here. If I ever say something to inspire the charge of a hobby horse, I want that correction.
Because I might get lazy. Or imprecise. The “correction” might be something I immediately recognize as “obviously true”, and want to say “Yeah yeah, that’s what I meant”. But it might not be what I said, and I may have been underweighting the importance of that little “nitpick” when I was writing. After all, that why there’s the charging of the hobby horse; the other person doesn’t think it’s some unimportant nitpick. And neither do the LW voters, in the cases you highlight.
Maybe it’s not.
If we try to discourage people from correcting real errors or misleading representations in the text, simply because the person pointing it out is unusually perceptive in this area, or is unusually aware of the importance of this kind of mistake, then we are in effect saying that we don’t want to hear from people who are uniquely suited to correcting specific errors. “Sorry, Eliezer, you’ve been riding this AI hobby horse too much. We agree that making an unfriendly superintelligence would be bad, which is why we’re going to make it friendly. Can’t we move on and build it now?”.
That doesn’t cut it when the issue actually is important, and often the awareness of these things falls on few people. “What is a woman?” exploded into such a huge issue that I’m glad we have our resident “hobby horse rider” here, with skin in the game, motivated to do very careful thinking and call out what he sees to be errors on our part. If he’s wrong he’s wrong, which is a different criticism. If he’s right though, I’d rather amend or clarify my writing to the satisfaction of the person who makes getting this particular thing right their thing. It might save me from mistakes I don’t properly appreciate.
The qualifier “to the satisfaction of the other person” is important here. I know you think you’ve gotten things close enough. Likely so do the other authors in your examples. I also know that the hobby horse riding commenters disagree, and so does the audience—at least in these cases. And that if you can’t pass their ITT you can’t know if you’re missing something that validates their perspective and invalidates yours. And that if you can, they won’t continue to think you don’t get it, and therefore won’t have reason to post those “unnecessary” comments.
While I understand the frustration, I’d rather have more hobby horse riders here. If I ever say something to inspire the charge of a hobby horse, I want that correction.
Because I might get lazy. Or imprecise. The “correction” might be something I immediately recognize as “obviously true”, and want to say “Yeah yeah, that’s what I meant”. But it might not be what I said, and I may have been underweighting the importance of that little “nitpick” when I was writing. After all, that why there’s the charging of the hobby horse; the other person doesn’t think it’s some unimportant nitpick. And neither do the LW voters, in the cases you highlight.
Maybe it’s not.
If we try to discourage people from correcting real errors or misleading representations in the text, simply because the person pointing it out is unusually perceptive in this area, or is unusually aware of the importance of this kind of mistake, then we are in effect saying that we don’t want to hear from people who are uniquely suited to correcting specific errors. “Sorry, Eliezer, you’ve been riding this AI hobby horse too much. We agree that making an unfriendly superintelligence would be bad, which is why we’re going to make it friendly. Can’t we move on and build it now?”.
That doesn’t cut it when the issue actually is important, and often the awareness of these things falls on few people. “What is a woman?” exploded into such a huge issue that I’m glad we have our resident “hobby horse rider” here, with skin in the game, motivated to do very careful thinking and call out what he sees to be errors on our part. If he’s wrong he’s wrong, which is a different criticism. If he’s right though, I’d rather amend or clarify my writing to the satisfaction of the person who makes getting this particular thing right their thing. It might save me from mistakes I don’t properly appreciate.
The qualifier “to the satisfaction of the other person” is important here. I know you think you’ve gotten things close enough. Likely so do the other authors in your examples. I also know that the hobby horse riding commenters disagree, and so does the audience—at least in these cases. And that if you can’t pass their ITT you can’t know if you’re missing something that validates their perspective and invalidates yours. And that if you can, they won’t continue to think you don’t get it, and therefore won’t have reason to post those “unnecessary” comments.
(I’m unsure if this is addressed at me, but if so, I’d probably need more proof-of-work of understanding to want to continue engaging.)